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St Marys Primary School and Nursery Unit, Portaferry

Super Scientists in P1!

12th Sep 2022

In P1 we have been talking about keeping our body healthy. One way we can do this is to keep clean by washing our hands, especially after we go to the toilet or before we touch food.

We wanted to know WHY it is important to have clean hands? Some boys and girls said it is because there are germs on our hands. We looked at our hands and couldn’t see any, so we decided to do some experiments to find out about germs🦠 

Mrs Mullan put some yellow paint on her hand and we pretended that it was germs. She put her hand on the desk and on an apple. She asked Mrs Breen and Sam did they want share of the apple. When we all looked we could see that the yellow paint had spread to the desk, onto the apple and onto Mrs Breen and Sam’s hands, just the way germs do, if we do not wash our hands when we go to the toilet!

Next we investigated how soap works. We poured some water on to a plate and sprinkled some pepper on top. This time we pretended that the pepper was germs. Mrs Breen put her finger in the peppered water and we could see how the pepper transferred on to her finger. 2 mini scientists then rubbed a little soap onto their finger and dipped it into the peppered water... we could not believe what happened... the pepper moved away from the soap to the edge of the plate, proving to us that germs do not like soap, and this is why we use it to wash our hands!

Mrs Mullan also brought in some magic soap... we used our scientific brains to guess what would happen when we put the soap in the microwave. We learned that the special name for having a guess during an experiment, is called a ‘hypothesis’. We guessed that it might get hot, melt, get smaller, get bigger and it might even explode!!!! πŸ’₯ It was fascinating to watch as the special soap expanded and got a lot bigger in the microwave. We used our senses to watch, listen, smell and touch the soap when it cooled down. Like all good scientists we recorded our results by taking some pictures of our experiments.

Such fantastic learning this morning in P1 πŸ§ͺπŸ¦ πŸŒ‘πŸ§«πŸ”¬πŸ§ΌπŸ¦ 

πŸ†πŸ†πŸ†πŸ†πŸ†πŸ†πŸ†πŸ†πŸ† Well done Super Scientists! πŸ§ͺ 🧬